1.08.2008

The author of a cookbook similar to Jessica Seinfeld's bestselling Deceptively Delicious has filed a federal lawsuit against Seinfeld and her comedian-husband. According to documents obtained by The Smoking Gun, Missy Chase Lapine claims that Jessica's recipes "brazenly plagiarized" from her 2007 cookbook titled "The Sneaky Chef." In the lawsuit, Lapine accuses Jerry Seinfeld of launching a "malicious, premeditated, and knowingly false and defamatory attack" on her after media reports noted similarities between the two books, which present recipes for getting kids to eat healthy food. Lapine says in her complaint that earlier this year Seinfeld went on The Late Show With David Letterman and compared Lapine to the kind of "wackos" that had once stalked Letterman, adding that Lapine was a "three-name woman." Seinfeld joked, "If you read history, many of the three-name people do become assassins." In the complaint, Lapine also accuses Seinfeld of calling Lapine a "nut job" in another TV interview.source